The U.N. General Assembly brought high-level officials together Monday to promote a two-state solution to the decades-old Israel-Palestinian conflict that would place their peoples side by side, living in peace in independent nations.
Israel and its close ally the United States are boycotting the two-day meeting, co-chaired by the foreign ministers of France and Saudi Arabia. Israel’s government opposes a two-state solution, and the United States has called the meeting “counterproductive” to its efforts to end the war in Gaza.
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France and Saudi Arabia want the meeting to put a spotlight on the two-state solution, which they view as the only viable road map to peace, and to start addressing the steps to get there.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres told ministers and diplomats at the opening of the meeting that a two-state solution is further away than ever before, pointing to “the obliteration of Gaza that has unfolded before the eyes of the world” and Israel’s threatened annexation of the West Bank — the key parts that could make up a Palestinian state.
Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Mustafa called for all countries who haven’t yet recognized statehood to do so “without delay,” welcoming France’s recent decision to do so in September.
“The path to peace begins by recognizing the state of Palestine and preserving it from destruction,” Mustafa told minsters and diplomats at the start of the gathering.
The meeting was postponed from late June and downgraded from a four-day meeting of world leaders amid surging tensions in the Middle East, including the 12-day Israel-Iran war, and the war in Gaza.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said that “this must be a turning point and a transformational juncture for the implementation of the two-state solution. We must work on the ways and means to go from the end of the war in Gaza to the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
By AP News